Hide from the cruel world, like President Obama and the Congressional Democrats, who should listen to this recent comment by Gary Becker, Nobel Prize winning economist.

To manage effectively a growing federal government debt, it is essential that the growth in entitlements be reduced, in part by raising the age of retirement and of access to Medicare. It is also crucial that government policies encourage more rapid economic growth of the American economy. Unfortunately, this is not true of many policies proposed or implemented during the past 18 months. These include, among many others, higher income taxes on corporations and on persons with bigger incomes, government regulation of pay, especially the pay of executives, health care “reform” that will raise, not lower, government spending on healthcare, special subsidies to various unproven green technologies, so-called job creation bills that create few jobs per dollar spent, and more aggressive anti-trust actions against successful companies, such as Google. These and other policies will reduce US economic growth at a time when faster growth is more necessary than ever.

Palladian--Becker won his Nobel Prize in 1992. If you look at his CV, which is linked at the Becker-Posner blog, you find that the Nobel Prize is listed near the bottom of his honors. That's because he's won about a zillion other prizes since the Nobel, and seems beautifully secure in his aging self and well earned reputation.

Contrast the hundreds of "Climate Scientists" who actually list the Nobel because they worked on some committee of other.

The Obami are touting the $20 billion "fund" to be set up by BP. Here's the fine print, from an AP article:

In creating a victims' compensation fund, BP will use noncore U.S. assets as security for its $20 billion obligation. Chief Financial Officer Byron Grote stopped short of calling it a lien, but he said the assets will be used as security.If BP had to borrow money in the future to pay any of its obligations, that might prove difficult because rising investor concerns could raise the company's borrowing costs. As of the end of March, BP reported only $6.8 billion in cash and cash equivalents. Grote said the amount has not changed "materially" since then.Svanberg announced the company would not pay dividends to shareholders for the rest of the year, including one scheduled for June 21 totaling about $2.6 billion. The company will make initial payments into the escrow fund of $3 billion this summer and $2 billion in the fall, followed by $1.25 billion per quarter until the $20 billion figure is reached.Aware that a healthy BP is in everyone's interest, Obama gave a plug for what he called "a strong and viable company" — a day after he had accused it of recklessness.

In other words, some sort of inchoate junior lien (if that even) on "noncore" assets. Read "noncore" are "lacking value."

BP will do what it's doing now--pay as they go. But someone else will disburse, thus putting the blame for slow pay on the intermediary, not BP.

Here's more on the BP "fund." These comments from the BP Chairman make it clear that the Obama attack on BP was having a material effect on its ability to finance, and that BP agreed to the "fund" as way to make it clear to the markets what its intermediate term liability will be.

The terms are not terribly onerous. The main victims are the shareholders of BP, whose dividend is being suspended.

John Rigby, analyst at UBS, said to Grote on the call, "It seems to me that BP agreed to pay $20 billion into escrow and suspended the dividend for three quarters, yet the BP chairman described the meeting as being constructive. So what did you get out of the meeting, from what appears to not be a legal requirement and something people thought was an aggressive stance taken by the U.S. government?"

Grote's response to Rigby involved both the political reality of the oil spill situation and the financial threat to BP of a situation that seemed to be worsening on a daily basis. "We believe we got the opportunity for the first time to have a constructive dialogue with the President. As the frustration has grown with the inability to cap the flow, there has been increasing concern about how BP was going to fulfill its obligations to all of those affected by incident, and the rhetoric has had some fairly dramatic affects on BP, both debt and equity markets observable for one and all."

Grote continued, "Much of the reaction was caused by deep uncertainty of how issues would be resolved. ... To have the chance for the chairman and CEO to sit down with the President and carve out an agreement that provides greater comfort and clarity and a framework consistent with the intention BP has had all along, allows our business to progress effectively," Grote said.

Specifically, the BP CFO said that being allowed to stage injections into the escrow account, "I hope provides greater comfort to debt and equity markets that there is not a very large and significant impact on BP coming in the immediate time frame."

The cash injections into the escrow account will be $5 billion per year over the next four years -- $3 billion in the third quarter 2010, $2 billion in the fourth quarter, and then $1.25 billion per quarter after that.

I think the conditions for the BP escrow fund and the oilrig workers' unemployment fund were carefully negotiated before the President's speech Tuesday night, so that the meeting this morning and the "perp walk" was just about all theater.

It is difficult to feel sorry for BP - this blowout may be the fault of just one person with poor judgment at the scene - but there is also the sickening advertising and other actions that lead to questions of the top management's intellectual integrity.

That said, I am very disturbed about the manner of this Administration's - and Congress' - attack on a private corporation. I think it sets some very bad precedents if they get away with it.

Lem...A bee keeper in Petaluma, Ca who ran his family's bee company told us that a new Monsanto sprayed on weed control chemical used on the base of the vines in the spring had been getting carried back to the hives and stopped the reproduction of new bees. He was a true expert, so I believed him.

Note: past comments at this site have generated a flurry of vile ad homs by Ann Althouse's tea party fans. The first link in this post points out how tea partiers have problems making an argument and are generally worthless as far as opposing the Dems. And, Ann Althouse's tea party fans have helped me illustrate my point by engaging in the same brainless, vile, childish, thuggish behavior I discuss at the first link in this post. Yes, the teapartiers are that dumb.

Note: past comments at this site have generated a flurry of vile ad homs by Ann Althouse's tea party fans. The first link in this post points out how tea partiers have problems making an argument and are generally worthless as far as opposing the Dems. And, Ann Althouse's tea party fans have helped me illustrate my point by engaging in the same brainless, vile, childish, thuggish behavior I discuss at the first link in this post. Yes, the teapartiers are that dumb. A good place to start discovering is my topics page. For instance, here's my extensive coverage of the NCLR, and here's a list of my posts about George Soros.

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So I tuned in to the later showing of Top Chef tonight and in the first 10 seconds we had a shot of Pelosi, followed by the exuberant pronouncement that DC is "Barack Obama'a City"! (notably not America's Capitol).

It looks like they have politicized one of my favorite shows and I won't be watching. Why do lefties have to foist this crap on everyone all the time?

In True Blood, one of the characters gets assaulted by a group of vampires. He puts off going to the hospital afterwards because he doesn't have any health insurance. Product placement of Democratic talking points in various movies and tv shows can make one feel cynical and manipulated......There isn't any question that BP is the heavy in this calamity. Their CEO had a press conference and expressed sympathy for the "little people". It sounded extremely condescending, and besides they should be offering aid to the fishermen and not Robert Reich....BP is the heavy, but that does not make Obama the hero. We have Obama's word that terror acts are not the works Islam. In similar fastion, it would go a long way if Obama did not portray this as the inevitable result of the petroleum industry's evil plot against America. Perhaps a kind word for the people working on the rigs to stop the leak would improve their morale better than the promise of criminal investigations when they get done.

@Lem: Yes, speed control and satellite radio. I didn't get the latter with my new Civic, so I'm going to get one of those that I can throw on the dash and plug into the 3.5mm iPod input, which it does have.

Not sure if I'm going to get XM or Sirius. They are both the same company now, so I don't know what differentiates them.